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The most powerful force of human behavior is willpower. When managers learn to activate willpower, or volition, in themselves and others, companies reap the benefits of purposeful action taking and see more projects completed.

But engaging volition isn’t easy. It’s a higher attainment than mere motivation. Motivation is the desire to do something; volition is the absolute commitment to achieving something. To activate their willpower, individuals must pass a mental barrier, a personal Rubicon.1 Our research reveals how successful leaders do that and how they use five simple strategies to help lower-level managers accomplish the same.

Recently, as researchers have begun to investigate what it takes for managers to follow through on ambitious goals, the study of willpower has reemerged from the disfavor into which it fell after World War II.2 The reason for management researchers’ interest is clear: Motivating managers with carrot and stick is overly simplistic. People commit to action for more subtle reasons.

New research into managerial action taking supports the distinction between motivation and volition. (See “About the Research.”) Project managers in the companies studied — some large, such as ConocoPhillips and Lufthansa, and others small, such as Micro Mobility Systems — rarely followed through when the going got rough. Only 10% took purposeful action to implement goals.3 The rest, despite knowing what they needed to do, simply did not do it.4

About the Research

The study’s conclusions are derived from two interrelated research streams. First, we conducted a multiyear qualitative and quantitative study to map purposeful managerial action and its drivers at Lufthansa in Europe and Conoco in the United States. At Lufthansa, we studied action taking by 130 midlevel managers who had taken on special change-related projects as part of a corporate initiative. Most were interviewed several times over a two-year period to review progress on implementation. At Conoco, we conducted a similar study of action taking by 50 project leaders. In the quantitative part, we surveyed the same 130 managers at Lufthansa and 250 managers at Conoco — including the 50 we interviewed and their superiors and direct reports — to collect data to explore the influences of a variety of individual, team and organization factors on purposeful action taking by individuals. The results from the surveys confirmed the hypotheses we had developed.

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References

1. Julius Caesar’s popularity was a threat to the Roman Senate, which ordered him to disband his army, then camped north of a small stream called the Rubicon. An ancient law forbade any general from crossing the Rubicon and entering Italy proper with a standing army. Despite knowing it was treason, Caesar deliberately crossed over on Jan. 11, 49 B.C. Once he had done so, there was no turning back; civil war was inevitable. From that point, Caesar had a single objective: to win the war.

2. Before World War II, Germany was the center of academic research on psychology. Freud and Jung had left a legacy of talented psychologists. Narziss Ach was one of the most eminent. His experiments clearly showed the distinction between motivation (the state of desire) and volition (the state in which motivation is converted to unwavering, resolute commitment). Unfortunately, the language of volition and will became a central tenet of Nazi ideology, although the Nazis based their views not on volition psychology but on philosophy, especially Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. After the war, Ach’s ideas on volition were cast aside along with the discredited ideology. However, Ach’s concept of will was different from the Nazis’. Unlike Schopenhauer, who saw it as distinct from and superior to reason, Ach viewed the engagement of the human will (volition) as the strongest force of human behavior, a force that existed with and beyond reason and was characterized by commitment beyond motivation or the meeting of superficial desires. See N. Ach, “Über den Willensakt und das Temperament: Eine Experimentelle Untersuchung (On the Act of the Will and Temperament: An Experimental Study)” (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1910).

H. Heckhausen analyzed the use of the words will and volition in “Psychological Abstracts.” He found that in the late 19th century and the early 20th, they were key words of psychological literature, but that there was a rapid downturn starting in 1930. By 1945, the term volition was no longer used and will was gone by 1970. See H. Heckhausen, “Perspektiven der Psychologie des Wollens (Perspectives of a Psychology of the Will),” in “Jenseits des Rubikon: Der Wille in den Humanwissenschaften (Beyond the Rubicon: The Will in Human Sciences),” eds. H. Heckhausen, P.M. Gollwitzer and F.E. Weinert (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1987): 143–175.

About the Authors

Sumantra Ghoshal is a professor of strategic leadership at London Business School, and Heike Bruch is a professor of leadership at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Contact them at sghoshal@london.edu and heike.bruch@unisg.ch.